Saturday, March 7, 2015

Thunder Moon Post Mortem: Early voxel lighting tests

Before there was Enzo (the red robot in Thunder Moon), the animation system, before there was much of anything, I was working mainly on the voxel system to make sure I was going to be able to make a voxel world work on the XBox with XNA. When I started this project in 2011, there weren't yet very many voxel games on XBLIG and none of them seemed to have the features I was hoping to implement so I was pretty optimistic about doing something new & cool.

These screenshots come from when I was working on the multithreaded lighting system. I could click with the mouse and carve tunnels with giant spheres out of the ground and then WASD around to see lighting and triangulation artifacts. Other keys would create or remove various patterns in the voxel world to more easily test problematic situations.

I had a lot of fun just flying around at this point, carving tunnels like a sandworm through the underworld.